A survey of IT buyers at medium to large US companies suggests the majority (87%) will have software defined networks (SDN) live in their data centers by 2016.

But one advocate of software definition of infrastructure has warned that there are still weaknesses to overcome.

According to Infonetics Research’s new report, 2014 SDN Strategies: North American Enterprise Survey, US companies are forging ahead with their plans for SDNs.

The analyst even hints that the market is consolidating.

"The leaders in the SDN market serving the enterprise will be solidified during the next two years as lab trials give way to live production deployments in 2015 and significant growth by 2016,” said analyst Cliff Grossner of Infonetics.

“The timelines for businesses moving from lab trials to live production for the data center and LAN are almost identical," Grossner said.

However, a very different picture emerged from Canadian software defined data center vendor Cirba, which warned that the software-defined data center (SDDC) cannot be fully realized until four sets of conditions are met.

According to Cirba CTO and founder Andrew Hillier, the perfect internal market for computing assets cannot be created, because SDNS lack a mechanism for demand management, capacity control, policy and automation.

“Much of the insight into the needs of applications exists in organizations today, but has been traditionally used to procure new hardware,” Hillier said.

This means that allocations of CPU, software and memory often don’t work.

“Today’s capacity management tooling is woefully inadequate for a world where the infrastructure is programmable and application demand changes on a daily basis,” Hillier said.

Policy is inadequate too, he said.

“At the heart of it all is the operational policy that governs how supply and demand are matched, aligned, and controlled. But if you look around most organizations today, all you will find is simplistic thresholds spread across operational tools,” Hillier said.

Automation needs to go beyond virtual machine provisioning he warned.

“There is a lack of intelligence guiding most automation today.”

However, according to Hillier software defined infrastructure (SDIC) could bridge the gap that has opened up in the data center management ecosystem.